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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   31838 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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blue tribe doesn't want immigration policy enforced

Digression, but the blue tribe is not a monolith.

Commenters may argue that "The purpose of a system is what it does". Therefore, Biden's intention was to flood the US with immigrants. However, outcomes based evaluations opens a can of worms that may not help the red tribe cause. Broadly, I don't believe the outcomes were the policy objectives, as much as the equilibrium result of internal infighting.

On this forum, we acknowledge sub-tribes within the Republican tent. Tech right, single-issue abortion voters, isolationists, heritage Americans, conspiracy theorists and anti-wokes, and so on. As the conversation evolves, I'd like to see the criticisms be targeted at different sub-tribes among Democrats, instead of the blue-tribe at large.

Sadly, Biden was senile and Kamala was a powerless face. This made them particularly ineffective. As a result, faceless staffers & unelected ideologues who caused the worst outcomes have avoided the public eye. Makes it hard to identify the leaders within the blue tribe who want open borders at the expense of American people. There is some real guerilla warfare going on there.

Name a single democrat elected official in federal office who has spoken explicitly in favor of deporting more illegals.

Maybe not in those exact words but does Ruben Gallego senator from Arizona count? Here is his plan

https://www.gallego.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/immigration-plan.pdf

No, he makes no mention of supporting deportations in any capacity in that doc.

Does John Fetterman count?

Does he? He is basically an R these days.

we should deport all criminal migrants.

Huh I'm surprised but I guess it counts.

I was about to say Manchin, but he's no longer in office and I'd forgotten he was officially Independent his last year.

Does 2016 Bernie Sanders count?

2020 Bernie Sanders buried that guy too effectively.

This 2016 bernie sanders? https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-senator-bernie-sanders-deportations https://web.archive.org/web/20160317081749/https://berniesanders.com/issues/a-fair-and-humane-immigration-policy/

I see not a single thing advocating for removing illegals, but tons of breathless advocacy for the importation of millions and millions of foreigners and also giving them citizenship.

Eleven Million New Americans

Sorry, I'm thinking back to 2007 when he nuked a pro immigration bill.

The years seem to run together these days.

Seems like there's roughly 4 types of Democrats on this issue:

  1. is the relatively moderate, centrist opinion. They're happy to accept legal immigrants, especially to fill job vacancies or reunite families, but they still want to enforce immigration law. Obama would be the most prominent example of this.
  2. is the more pragmatic, squishy, vague position. They're still in principle against illegal immigration, but they don't really want to do anything to enforce it either. There seems to be a strong sense of "but how else would we get the work done without them?" here, especially in certain industries like meat processing that are pretty nasty work for low pay. I think this is how Biden thought about it.
  3. is the more emotional position. They just hate seeing anyone get hurt, so pictures of people who are not visibly committing a crime getting arrested really triggers them. The actual issue isn't really important, especially when it's a smaller, weaker, more photogenic person getting arrested by an armed federal agent in a black uniform. Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and most of the street protestors seem to have this position.
  4. is the more academic position. They see the US as being a vast chunk of unused territory, stolen from the native americans, which has no right to be nationalistic. They want to help the overall world GDP by moving as many immigrants as possible into the US, and also create a huge voting advantage for leftists. To that end, they really don't care whether immigrants are legal or illegal, and would prefer open borders. You don't see this view a lot from elected officials (at least not openly), but plenty of people express it online, especially from college students and their lefty professors.

I know people on the right who fit into (1) pretty well too: "We're fine with immigrants, but we should enforce the laws as written because that's the process. Those laws could maybe be improved (exact direction unclear), but distributed decisions to not enforce laws is not the way to change them." Those folks are generally pretty positive about legal immigrants and naturalization, although maybe there's some skepticism of specific programs (H1-B).

I would describe myself as a proponent of a more reasoned, systematized form of 3. I regard illegal immigration per se as something that certainly should be illegal, but which it is wholly disproportionate to repress through life-ruining violence, especially when we are in a status quo where millions of people are involved. Treating every illegal as if they were some sort of dangerous felon seems as obviously daft and inhumane to me as clapping people in irons for jaywalking.

If there is an epidemic of jaywalking in the country with millions and millions of jaywalkers, and death tolls from traffic accidents start rising as a result, then certainly you should take top-down measures to curb the phenomenon - but going after individual, benign jaywalkers with the full force of the law would be an absurd and nasty way to do it. If a strict interpretation the law as written designates millions of perfectly harmless people as serious criminals, then there's an unaccountable chasm between the letter of the law and the reality we're faced with. Ruining random people's lives (and in some cases ending them) for daring to do what hundreds of thousands of people do every year, what half the population of their own country would sympathize with at worst and actively praise at best, is not how you deal with that - it is not kind, it is not just, and it's frankly not that effective, compared to a more systematic solution that treated the cause instead of bashing the symptom.

You can stop a jaywalking in progress by getting the jaywalker out of the street. It seems absurd to me to compare that to an ongoing crime where halting it requires forcing the perpetrator to move their entire residence.

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